"Rainbow Road" from Mario Kart World on the Nintendo Switch 2
Composer(s): Atsuko Asahi, Maasa Miyoshi, Takuhiro Honda, Yutaro Takakuwa
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
I honestly don't know how I'm going to write anything after 8-bit Music Theory already did a 20-minute video on this very song about six months ago. But we're going to take a slightly different approach because the last music theory class I took was 24 years ago.
Discussion of the song needs to be prefaced with a little bit about the entirety of the Rainbow Road track in Mario Kart World. Unlike a lot of Rainbow Road tracks in Mario Kart games, this iteration of the track is linear without any traditional loops, although the track is broken up into four or five distinct areas, depending on how you approach the track. If you race on the track as part of a circuit, there is a bit of a prologue that happens in the song from the start up to about 1:36. During this time, the best way I can describe it is "anticipatoryly ambient." The piano and guitar just kind of vamp/vibe out with no clear direction as to where the melody could be. There is a chime tone that, when taken into context, sounds to me like the main hint that this is a track for Rainbow Road. At 0:36, strings (and horns?) come in to break up the monotony a bit, and it's only at 0:56 that the synth tones bring the first real introduction of this Rainbow Road main melody.
Only once the song hits 1:36, does Lap 1 really begin (which is where the race starts if you're racing in Versus Mode and select Rainbow Road as the track you're racing on), and we get a fuller version of the main theme. This theme is then played in full from 1:48 through 2:14, and I feel a little guilty saying this, but these 16 seconds, for me, are all of the song that I would consider hummable. I've talked a bit before about how a lot of older video game themes are now considered classic because of how melody-heavy they were, mainly/partly because the themes were hummable. And those 16 seconds are no exception. The next 30 seconds sound like they're vibing on this theme without actually restating it, and that's okay, but the remaining 45 seconds of the song are kind of lost on me. Granted, I don't really do "jazz" as a genre. I can appreciate it, but I have a hard time following what I'm supposed to hold on to melody-wise, or if it's just supposed to be "listen to me jazz!"
The next section is a mellow, jazzy piano take on the main theme (that I'm able to follow), which happens during Lap 2, when the race moves away from the traditional Rainbow Road and into a dreamy, flowing blue river. The piano and high-hat drum fit the setting really well and are taken over (a bit) by the return of the synth tone, which restates the piano variation of the main theme. AND THEN we get this whispy choral-ahh singing the same melody variation.
There's a brief saxophone interlude-thing that happens and leads right into Lap 3, which starts off landing on a rotating space station. It's here that we get a synth return to the main theme of Rainbow Road, followed by a transition back into the Mario Kart World theme, which vamps during a guitar solo for the remainder of the track. I don't know if the Mario Kart World theme is supposed to happen about the same time that you start driving through the right-angle tunnel, and a return to a LED Rainbow Road track, since this track can only be so dynamic.
The one big change between this specific track and how it plays in the game is that here, there is no "Final Lap" fanfare that plays as you enter the final lap. In the music, this happens at 6:26, and it's a full orchestra return to the Rainbow Road theme, and it gives me chills every time the theme concludes with the brass section coming in. I'm not going to go into all of the musical self-references this song includes in the last 90 seconds, since 8-bit Music Theory does an amazing job already that I can't really add to. But these last 90 seconds of "Rainbow Road" are an amazing way to finish out an otherwise long and windy rainbow-themed track that feels more fun and triumphant than the potentially punishing no-rails track that it could have easily become (again).
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